I'm using the optparse module for option/argument parsing. For backwards compatibility reasons, I can't use the argparse module. How can I format my epilog message so that newlines are preserved?

In the below example, I'd like the epilog to be printed as formatted.

    epi = \
"""
Examples usages:Do something%prog -a -b fooDo something else%prog -d -f -h bar
"""parser = optparse.OptionParser(epilog=epi)

See the first answer at:

python optparse, how to include additional info in usage output?

The basic answer is to subclass the OptionParser

class MyParser(optparse.OptionParser):def format_epilog(self, formatter):return self.epilog